"December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. ... Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. ... With confidence in our armed forces -- with the unbounded determination of our people -- we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God." --Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat far removed from today's crop of defeatists

related gibberish:I recommend the USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii for those who have not seen it.I think only three US WW1 vets are still alive. I guess the depression was slowing at the end of the 30's and early 40's as countries went into WW2. The US emerged as the only superpower in 1945.

Remembering Pearl Harbor"December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. ... Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. ... With confidence in our armed forces -- with the unbounded determination of our people -- we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God." --Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat far removed from today's crop of defeatists

On that fateful "Day of Infamy," 353 Japanese planes attacked a military target killing 2,390 American servicemen and civilians and wounding 1,282. The attack sank or damaged eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers and one minelayer and destroyed 188 aircraft. It took four years and the full military-industrial capability of the United States to defeat Japan. It is with honor and respect for those who died or suffered terrible injuries that Sunday morning that we should never again fall into the slumber that allowed such a tragedy as Pearl Harbor -- or the attack on Sept. 11, 2001 -- again.

Remembering Pearl Harbor"December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. ... Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. ... With confidence in our armed forces -- with the unbounded determination of our people -- we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God." --Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat far removed from today's crop of defeatists

On that fateful "Day of Infamy," 353 Japanese planes attacked a military target killing 2,390 American servicemen and civilians and wounding 1,282. The attack sank or damaged eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers and one minelayer and destroyed 188 aircraft. It took four years and the full military-industrial capability of the United States to defeat Japan. It is with honor and respect for those who died or suffered terrible injuries that Sunday morning that we should never again fall into the slumber that allowed such a tragedy as Pearl Harbor -- or the attack on Sept. 11, 2001 -- again.

"Intelligence is the amount of time it takes to forget a lesson."Let us remember this day and those who fought and died for us on it.

I wanted to put something today in the Grateful thread, but hear-hear to Crafty and the forum, we have a thread for this.

I am grateful for all who rose up and fought back. I mean all of them, but I am thinking of my Grandpa who served at Pearl Harbor, my Dad who served in Europe and Germany in particular, and my uncle who went from Normandy to command a ship at Iwo Jima. God Bless these wonderful people who saw evil coming, saw the threat to America before it hit the 48 states and gave up their young lives of freedom to go do what was right - and to win.

You don't attack the United States of America, plan attacks, aid, abet, harbor terrorist training camps, none of it. May this date live in infamy and may we remember some of the good things about America and freedom that we were fighting to keep.

From time to time, I take a break from opinion writing here at Works and Days and turn to history — on this occasion, I am prompted by the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here are a few of the most common questions that I have encountered while teaching the wars of the 20th century over the last twenty years.

I. Pearl Harbor — December 7, 1941

Q. Why did the Japanese so foolishly attack Pearl Harbor?

A. The Japanese did not see it as foolish at all. What in retrospect seems suicidal did not necessarily seem so at the time. In hindsight, the wiser Japanese course would have been to absorb the orphaned colonial Far Eastern possessions of France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain that were largely defenseless after June 1941. By carefully avoiding the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, the Japanese might have inherited the European colonial empire in the Pacific without starting a war with the United States. And had the Japanese and Germans coordinated strategy, the two might have attacked Russia simultaneously in June 1941 without prompting a wider war with the United States, or in the case of Japan, an immediate conflict necessarily with Great Britain.

But in the Japanese view, the Soviets had proved stubborn opponents in a series of border wars, and it was felt wiser to achieve a secure rear in Manchuria to divert attention to the west (the Russians, in fact, honored their non-aggression pact with the Japanese until late 1945) — especially given the fact that the Wehrmacht in December 1941 seemed likely to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in a few weeks or by early 1942.

In the Japanese mind, the moment was everything: it was high time to get in on the easy pickings in the Pacific before Germany ended the war altogether.

While the United States had belatedly begun rearming in the late 1930s, the Japanese were still convinced that in a naval war, their ships, planes, and personnel were at least as modern and plentiful, if not more numerous and qualitatively better than what was available to the United States. The growing isolationism of the United States that had been championed by the likes of icons like Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh, the persistent Depression, and the fact that the United States had not intervened in Europe but instead watched Britain get battered for some 26 months from September 1939 to December 1941 suggested to many in the Japanese military command that the United States might either negotiate or respond only halfheartedly after Pearl Harbor. Especially after the envisioned loss of the American carrier fleet.

Japanese intelligence about American productive potential was about as limited as German knowledge of the Soviet Union. In Tokyo’s view, if Japanese naval forces took out the American Pacific carriers at Pearl Harbor, there was simply no way for America, at least in the immediate future, to contradict any of their Pacific agendas. Nor on December 7 could the Japanese even imagine that Germany might lose the war on the eastern front; more likely, Hitler seemed about to take Moscow, ending the continental ground conflict in Eurasia, and allowing him at last to finish off Great Britain. Britain’s fall, then, would mean that everything from India to Burma would soon be orphaned in the Pacific, and Japan would only have to deal with a vastly crippled and solitary United States. In short, for the Japanese, December 1941 seemed a good time to attack the United States — a provocation that would either likely be negotiated or end in a military defeat for the U.S.

Seventy-five years ago today, the sun rose on Oahu a few minutes before 6:30. Later accounts vary in many details, but all agree that the day dawned fair—blue skies, wispy clouds, a fresh breeze. It was a quiet Sunday morning.

On the great naval base at Pearl Harbor, a battle-of-the-bands competition had been held the evening before. American battleships carried 20-man bands, and in a semifinal two weeks earlier the USS Arizona’s had qualified for the final round. The concert on Dec. 6 was a second semifinal, and the Arizona’s musicians attended only to watch and listen.

Next morning, they were back aboard ship. When “first call to colors” was bugled just before eight, the band formed up on the fantail to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But before they struck up, there came the drone of approaching aircraft.

Astonishingly—incredibly—low-flying planes, bearing the distinctive red “meatball” insignia, appeared, dropping torpedoes and dive bombing. Arizona’s bandsmen rushed to their battle stations. The Coast Guard’s motto is semper paratus, always ready, but in 1941 peace-loving America was minime paratus, very little prepared, even though Europe had been at war for over two years and Japan for more than four.

“The Navy is not going to be caught napping,” the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, had promised a mere three days earlier. The Japanese attack—boldly conceived, assiduously plotted and rehearsed, shamelessly perfidious—torpedoed not only battleships, but American complacency.

Japan’s great victory, however, was a catastrophic miscalculation. Never since have Americans been so collectively aroused, ignited and determined. The empire’s doom was assured even before the attacking aircraft had returned to their carriers 200 miles north of Oahu. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet and architect of the attack, feared as much. If ordered to go to war with America, he had warned, “I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”

In exactly six months—June 7, 1942—a shattered Japanese strike force would retreat from Midway, leaving four aircraft carriers on the bottom of the Pacific. Yamamoto survived Pearl Harbor by less than two years: American pilots, fittingly, ambushed his plane during an inspection tour of Japanese bases.

Hearing of Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill in beleaguered Britain gloated: “Hitler’s fate was sealed,” while the Japanese “would be ground to powder.” And so they were.

But for the 2,400 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, there would be no victory celebration. At battle quarters, Arizona’s bandsmen did not fiddle. When general quarters sounded, they dropped their cornets and clarinets and hurried to the ammunition hoists beneath the forward turrets, where they handled the heavy powder bags for the ship’s 14-inch guns.

At nearby Tripler Army Hospital, Army nurse Anna Busby was herself a patient that morning, with an infected cheek. Hearing explosions, she rushed out to a lanai to look. “My God! The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!” another nurse exclaimed. “Well, we will all be needed on duty,” Anna replied. She doffed her patient’s gown and donned her nurse’s uniform. “You can’t go anywhere with that red face,” the chief nurse said. “You’d better take charge of the women’s ward.” And so, Anna recalled, “I reported on duty, took the report, and now I was in charge of the women’s ward, where I was a patient in the last hour.”

Only minutes after the attack began, a Japanese bomb hit the Arizona, triggering a volcanic explosion in the forward magazines. The ship broke in half and quickly sank. Almost 1,200 sailors and Marines, including all 21 musicians, died.

We sleep peacefully in our beds at night, it has been said, because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. But few of the sailors on the Arizona were rough men. Many were homesick young recruits, 18- and 19-year-old boys from rural and working-class America. One bandsman had enlisted the year before at 16. Arizona’s dead remain entombed in their sunken ship, America’s most poignant war memorial.

At Gettysburg, the Park Service boasts of offering visitors “fresh experiences for a new generation.” There’s no need for “fresh experiences” at Pearl Harbor. Silent, still and solemn beneath the harbor’s lapping waters, the Arizona mourns her dead mutely, timelessly.

They fought the enemy, said a poet. We fight fat living and self-pity.

Arizona’s wounds still bleed. Every day, two or three quarts of oil seep from the ship and float to the surface. “I was very, very frightened,” nurse Busby recalled of Dec. 7 and the days following. Like most on Oahu, she feared the attack was prelude to invasion. Japanese brutalities in China made this a terrifying prospect.

“I was petrified,” she admitted. “But I did my duties. I carried on.”

Mr. Garnett is a professor of English literature at Gettysburg College.